In a craven country where we simultaneously crave more Gordon Gekko and loathe the Bernie Madoffs, something's gotta give. A manifesto for the end of cultural hypocrisy.

Ten years ago, rallying behind a movie's rotten protagonist was enough of a novelty that Warner Bros. marketed its Mel Gibson film Payback with this tagline: GET READY TO ROOT FOR THE BAD GUY. We're more than ready now we're inclined to. In 2009, Gibson's sadistic, wife-beating bandit would blend right in among the misanthropes, sociopaths, adulterers, thieves, killers, and other malcontents populating our popular culture. Not too many people are exactly singing the praises of Joe "The Bummer" Lieberman today, but onscreen, certainly, it's a great time to be a terrible person.

Sure, American audiences have always had a weakness for antiheroes from Rebel Without a Cause's Jim Stark to Taxi Driver's Travis Bickle. But our recent taste for ruthlessness suggests something a little more primal, even two-faced. We rail against the treachery of Bernie Madoff and other cretins of industry, yet their transgressions have laid groundwork for the much-anticipated return of the reprehensible Gordon Gekko in Oliver Stone's upcoming Wall Street sequel. We condemn David Letterman as a lech, then tune in to Mad Men every Sunday to see which illicit coupling Don Draper will undertake this week. We pillory Richard Heene as the unscrupulous, publicity-whore architect of the "Balloon Boy" scandal, yet canonize the Gosselins, Pratts, and other manipulative monsters as reality-TV royalty. And that's to say nothing of the serial killers, hit men, cutthroat lawyers, and gangsters thriving in our midst.

What gives? In a word, hypocrisy. Americans are more trained than ever in the personal success of personal excess. And yet we're instantly aghast whenever winning and sinning come together anywhere outside of Hollywood.

On TV and at the movies, the absolutes of accountability can never compromise our love affair with the flawed. Meanwhile, in Washington (where Congress just this week got around to managing "too big to fail") and on Wall Street (where Bear Stearns execs are just this month getting tried for fraud) and through the annals Hollywood (it only took Paul Haggis 35 years to renounce Scientology!), our reluctance to make bad guys pay has been exposed for the untenable custom it is. Whether onscreen or off, we enable evil as a means to get ahead until we are implicated ourselves, of course, by which time we've covered our tracks with outraged lather.

That's a lot of the reason we hate Madoff so much: not just because he fabricated a $50 billion pyramid scheme and cost thousands of investors their life savings, but also because, in the end, he was just too stupid to sustain it. What's to appreciate in that? A lot, I say, at least in narrative terms: By the scale of his fraud alone, Madoff is no less flawed, complex, and maybe even sympathetic a character than There Will Be Blood's oil baron Daniel Plainview, a motherfucker to end all motherfuckers whose catchphrase "I drink your milkshake" loosely translates to, "I stole every last asset you had, and now I'm going to kill you." Was it the swindling and the drunken bludgeoning of his victim that made Plainview such an enduring American folk hero? No. It was our flimsy self-reassurance that Plainview is fiction, when in reality he like Gekko in Wall Street, Tony Montana in Scarface, and yes, Madoff in his no-questions-asked days represents the rich we all envy. Until they fell, each wielded an elegant impunity moviegoers could aspire to. But if the proliferation of Scarface merchandise and the excitement around Wall Street 2's Manhattan production are any indication, we learned little from their disgrace.

Lest we relinquish our ownership of the high ground, however, we've also embraced men whose misbehavior counteracts impunity. This has nothing to do with the economy, but rather good old-fashioned American vengeance. Few properties have played this dynamic as strenuously (and successfully) as Dexter, in which the title character is a prolific serial killer who only knocks off killers, rapists, and other irredeemable dregs of society thus joining their ranks, of course, but at least he's dregs with a purpose. Same goes for the current number-two movie at the box office, Law Abiding Citizen, in which Gerard Butler wreaks ungodly vigilante havoc follows the light prison sentence for the killer of his character's wife and daughter. All the better if it implicates the flaws in our system, from Clint Eastwood's bloody anti-gang compulsions in Gran Torino to the torment of Jamie Foxx's careerist prosecutor in Citizen. For the cultural consumer, it's all a freakish emotional variation on simple math: A negative times a negative equals a positive. Add in the vicarious rush of moral superiority, and you've got catharsis and a blockbuster.

TLC (Gosselin); DreamWorks (<i>Up in the Air</i>)

All this amounts to, ultimately, is a reinforcement of our lack of faith in the system to function at all, which makes us a party to its failure. Nothing in American culture reflects this more vividly than our inflation of Jon and Kate Gosselin, Spencer Pratt, Jackie Warner, Gordon Ramsay, and scores of other reality-TV assholes as cultural totems. If "Thou shalt not exercise scruples" is the First Commandment of fame in 2009, then what's really more outrageous: that Richard Heene exploited his six-year-old son in notoriety's pursuit, or that we, the vultures at home, hold him in such unanimous contempt for doing so?

If it's the former, then we've got some major reversals to make in our viewing routines. Try some of this season's best redemption narratives: an overweight Harlem teen in Precious, a narcissistic George Clooney in Up in the Air, a vain savant in An Education, even an all-too-autobiographical David Duchovny in Californication. They're all plenty complex and plenty stimulating, modern tales (made after the Wall Street crash, and the Hollywood strike) in which nihilism is a functional counterpoint to decency not just a thrill-seeking rejection of it. But if it's the latter, and we really hate the Richard Heenes of the world that much, then, hey, at least it'll be easy to root for the bad guy. He's beginning to look more and more like ourselves every rotten day.

S.T. VanAirsdale is a senior editor at Movieline.com. His film criticism and industry analysis have appeared in the New York Times, Vanity Fair, New York, the Huffington Post, Defamer, and The Reeler, which he founded.

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